Science & Technology Quiz: Nuclear Programme of India

The Tarapur Atomic Power Station in Maharashtra was commissioned in 1969 with American assistance and was the first nuclear power station in India as well as in Asia; its first two units are boiling water reactors, a design used nowhere else in the country.

The CANDU design, from which India's pressurised heavy water reactors descend, burns natural uranium, and natural uranium contains only about seven parts in a thousand of the fissile isotope uranium 235.

In a boiling water reactor, the design used at Tarapur, ordinary water is allowed to boil inside the reactor vessel itself, so the coolant leaving the core is a mixture of water and steam; the steam is separated at the top and driven straight to the turbine, without the separate…

Bhabha founded the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in 1945, became the first chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1948, drew up the three stage plan built around India's thorium, and led the establishment at Trombay that was renamed the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre after his death in 1966.

Apsara went critical at Trombay near Mumbai on 4 August 1956 and was the first nuclear research reactor not only in India but in the whole of Asia; the CIRUS reactor of 1960 and the Dhruva reactor of 1985 were built at the same site, which is today the Bhabha…

The second stage uses the plutonium 239 recovered from the spent fuel of the first stage as the fuel of a fast breeder reactor, with a blanket of thorium around the core that is converted into uranium 233; a breeder produces more fissile material than it burns, which is how…

The test was carried out in the desert at Pokhran in Rajasthan on 18 May 1974 and was described by India as a peaceful nuclear explosion; Raja Ramanna led the team.

On 11 May 1998 India tested three nuclear devices at Pokhran under Operation Shakti, followed by two more on 13 May, and the day was declared National Technology Day to mark that achievement along with the test flight of the Trishul missile and the first flight of the Hansa aircraft…

The Jaduguda mine lies in the Singhbhum belt of Jharkhand and has been worked by the Uranium Corporation of India Limited, a public sector company set up in 1967, since the late nineteen sixties; it was the first uranium mine in the country.

Kudankulam in the Tirunelveli district of Tamil Nadu uses pressurised water reactors of the Russian VVER type, supplied under an agreement signed with the Soviet Union in 1988 and carried forward by Russia.